Ross Stapleton-Gray is Stapleton-Gray & Associates’ principal analyst and the founder of the Sorting Door Project.

What are the goals of the Sorting Door Project?

It is intended to examine RFID, surveillance and privacy issues. In a nutshell, while the read ranges of passive RFID tags are fairly short, they might be readily scanned in constrained spaces, like doorways; doorways are also natural places to want to monitor individuals, e.g., to welcome a friend (or valued customer), or bar access to a threat. The project proposes to link numerous and independent Sorting Doors (the name derives from the Sorting Hat, of the Harry Potter series, which could mystically look into the character of the wizardry student on whose head it was placed) to back end resources used to aggregate and analyze RFID-derived data, and to make inferences about the nature of those passing through the Doors.